Nobody likes a slow loading website but is it worth being overly concerned about?
Well hard research shows for every 1 second extra delay in page load speed can lose you around 7% of your potential conversions. Whether you’re selling a product or trying to get a new member to your organisation that hurts! Apart from the satisfaction of your users, page load speed is one of several hundred metrics Google has for judging your site worthy or not and a fast site is something you can get right with care and attention.
What needs to be changed? Well a good host is very important as cheap hosting will work but it won’t work as fast as a better spec’ed service. Once that’s right the focus is really on how you present your files. Optimising imagery in several ways helps. Files straight from your camera are a big no-no and some care should be taken to reduce image dimensions to only what is necessary and use compression before posting. Here using the excellent JPEGmini tool we see a image radically compressed but not suffer for it:
You can compress other content like the code the site is written with, but this is squarely in the remit of your web designer. Although there are other tricks of the trade, caching & compression are the backbone of a fast site.